I opted last night for something I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. I knew it was on my Fill-In Filmography poster. I knew director John Cassavetes, like Ken Russell, was a director whose work I hadn’t gotten around to yet. I knew very little beyond that. What I got was so raw, unfiltered, and perhaps one of the most emotionally honest movies I have seen if not in my life than at least recently.
It’s also not the sort of movie I think I will ever watch a second time, and the story behind how it got made is impressive all by itself.
Writer/director Cassavestes was apparently inspired when his wife, actress Gena Rowlands, said she wanted to be in a play about how rough life was for contemporary women. Cassavestes then wrote the script for this movie as a play, but Rowlands thought it would be too emotionally rough to play that eight performances a week. Cassavestes then rewrote it as a film script, but he needed money to make it. No big studio was interested, so he asked people he knew, with friend Peter Falk personally donating $50,000. Falk would go on to take the male lead opposite Rowlands. From there, Cassavestes had to film his movie in an actual house, he cast Rowlands’s mother as her character’s mother and his own mother as Falk’s. When the movie was finished, Cassavestes couldn’t get distribution for it and had to personally call up movie theaters to run his movie. The movie would go on to achieve great critical acclaim, though not without its detractors, and earn Oscar nominations for Rowlands’s performance and Cassavestes’s direction. Oh, and on a side note, unlike many Hollywood couples, Rowlands and Cassavestes stayed married until his death, and those sorts of things always surprise me.
As for the plot, it’s actually pretty simple: housewife and mother of three Mabel Longhetti (Rowlands) has a life that is essentially falling apart due to the stresses of what she goes through on a daily basis. She seems to be turning to alcohol, but she may also be bipolar. The movie didn’t seem to say, but she’s falling apart. Her husband Nick (Falk) loves her, but his job as the foreman for a small construction crew means his hours are irregular as it is. He can see she’s falling apart, and for the most part, doesn’t quite know what to do. About the only thing I can say for certain is he loves her and his children, and she does love them back. They’re just both in a stressful situation where neither of them knows quite what to do, and all Nick really wants is what’s best for Mabel.
First off, anyone who only knows Falk as Lt. Columbo will probably be in for a shock here. This is the sort of movie where the only thing I really knew for certain was he loved his wife, but he was at his wits’ end. It’s probably the less flashy performance from the lead couple, but it really works. Rowlands is likewise fantastic. Her more manic episodes may not always work as well as they could, but the quieter moments when she just silently shows anxiety when she’s thrust into having to deal with people, even her own kids, sells the turmoil her character is going through. The two leads here really make this one, and if there’s a genre for this beyond “drama,” I’d say it was “slice of life.”
It’s worth noting the movie doesn’t make the central couple out to be perfect or anything. Mabel while drunk brings a man home while Nick is pulling a nightshift at one point, and Nick slaps her across the face two or three times at different points in the movie to try to get her calm down. The slaps bothered me, possibly because these were seen as more socially acceptable in 1974 than they are today. I do still think Nick loves Mabel and is mostly just uncertain what a loving husband should do, but those moments were a bit jarring. I suspect they were supposed to be, but that doesn’t change that these moments happened. Still, A Woman Under the Influence is that look at a couple pulling at the threads of their marriage, both suffering in their own way, one due to what looks like mental illness, and the other just through trying to hold everything together. I thought the movie was excellent. I still plan to never watch it again.
Grade: A
0 Comments